Facilitating leadership team communication

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to understand and describe how to facilitate competent communication in leadership teamwork. Grounded in the premises of social constructionism and informed by such theoretical frameworks as coordinated management of meaning theory (CMM), dialogic organization development (OD), systemic-constructionist leadership, communication competence, and reflexivity, this study seeks to produce further insights into understanding leadership team communication, communication competence, and team facilitation as applied communication research. This study consists of five articles. The first focuses on the theoretical framing of the relationality of communication competence in the context of organization development. The second article presents the first empirical dataset from thematic interviews with leadership team members and describes the typical communication challenges leadership teams face. The third article presents the second dataset on a participatory action research process conducted as a development program for a top leadership team at a manufacturing company. This article focuses on explaining and describing the facilitation process which promoted team reflexivity. The fourth article takes an applied theoretical perspective to show how CMM theory can be used as a practical method for facilitating leadership team communication. The fifth article demonstrates the practical value of the study by presenting a Leadership Team Tool built on the theoretical underpinnings of communication as meaning making and designed for the context of leadership teamwork. The findings suggest that leadership teams face various complex communication challenges, and to deal with these challenges and further build competent communication patterns, it is important that leadership teams develop reflective practice and reflexivity within their core processes. Competent communication and reflexivity can be developed through facilitation grounded in the emerging discourses and communication patterns of the social system. This insight should be taken into consideration in addition to more traditional communication-development programs which too often are based on fixed, individual-based definitions of communication competence.